📢 Deadline extended!
#ALIFE2026 submissions are now open until April 12 (AoE).
⚠️ Final extension
📌 Submissions are not anonymized this year
👉 2026.alife.org
#ALIFE2026 #ArtificialLife #CallForPapers #Conference
Our new paper on antifragility in ecology and evolution is out in @asn-amnat.bsky.social: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Not a paleontologist, but this is so true. I took a paleontology seminar in college where we got to do research and it still blows my mind that, after enough hours staring at them, I temporarily gained the power to see subtle differences in this one bone that Devonian lobe-finned fishes had.
Yay! Hopefully they will also approve the NSF and NASA apportionments soon.
A line graph of the number of NSF awards in fiscal 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves and increasing only very slowly.
NSF Update through March 13, 2026
1/2
Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference:
Things in US science are far, far worse than people know.
Far worse than even other scientists know.
1/
That's fair. I think I probably would too if they didn't publish Entropy, which many complex systems folks seem to take seriously
I consider them to be in between, along with MDPI. There are some legitimate papers published by both, but I don't super trust the process at either. I published one paper in frontiers and probably wouldn't again. I generally don't review for either, although I make some exceptions, eg MDPI Entropy
LANSING STAND UP FOR SCIENCE MARCH 7TH NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION RALLY MICHIGAN STATE CAPITOL
LANSING!!! Visit this link:
fight2win.standupforscience.net/Lansing-March
to learn more about your local SATURDAY MARCH 7TH RALLY
to TAKE BACK OUR SCIENCE!
See map for location! Rally starts at 1pm and goes till 3pm!
#March7Lansing
#standupforscience
#science
#savescience!
📢 Call for Papers: #ALIFE2026
Waterloo 🇨🇦 & online | 17–21 Aug 2026
📝 Full Papers & Summaries: 30 March 2026
📌 Special Sessions, Workshops & Tutorials proposals: 20 Feb 2026
Theme: Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems
2026.alife.org
You're right, but I feel gross about potentially benefiting from this
Two rejections, one on major evolutionary transitions and one on species interaction networks
I agree. That said, I think she deserves a lot of credit for her work on the video reminding the military that they don't have to obey unlawful orders and her subsequent handling of Trump's threats against her.
Save the date!
The annual #Conference on #ArtificialLife - #ALIFE2026 will take place in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), 17-21 August 2026. More details coming soon!
Based on this (creativecommons.org/using-cc-lic...) it looks like CC-ND would do the trick, but that's not an option for OSF preprints, right?
Good to know, thanks! I guess I'll need to think about switching to CC-BY-ND as my default.
It's not clear to me that CC-BY should permit feeding a work into an LLM, given the propensity of LLMs to incorporate text/ideas into themselves and then spit them back out without attribution.
Step 1: GenAI coding contains almost twice as many errors as human coding.
Step 2: Satya Nadella says as much as 30% of Microsoft code is written by AI.
Step 3: Windows 11 is a sluggish, buggy mess.
One of my most formative experiences in academic medicine was chasing down a citation.
I wanted to cite a reassurance I heard in residency that a 1cm dural exposure over the ear was okay. I found it--it was from a book chapter without any experimental evidence.
The experience rewired my brain.
This is 100% infuriating.
Our paper on constraints and functions is out!
We show that agents can change from open loop control behavior to closed loop control by modifying their environment.
It’s a follow up to many of the ideas that Tim Taylor explores with his POA framework.
direct.mit.edu/isal/proceed...
was at an event on AI for science yesterday, a panel discussion here at NeurIPS. The panelists discussed how they plan to replace humans at all levels in the scientific process. So I stood up and protested that what they are doing is evil.
Full post:
togelius.blogspot.com/2025/12/plea...
Thank you for saying something!
My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)
Our #ALIFE2025 paper is out! 🎉 We show that even when two circuits produce the same output, their evolutionary potential can differ greatly. #Evolution at the smallest scale.
“Parameter Evolvability in Gene Expression Models Drives Phenotypic Adaptation”
🔗 direct.mit.edu/isal/proceed...
Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
I've used Readwise Reader for this and it's worked fine! read.readwise.io
I've never used Debian or Manjaro, but again, I'm skeptical that there could be a big enough difference for it to be worth it. Ubuntu is the most commonly used distro. For a group resource, there is a lot of merit in using the most common thing. You'll find better support, etc.
I like pop (it's my laptop's OS), but it's not different enough from Ubuntu that I'd think it's worth switching on the recommendation of one student (also right now the current release is old enough that it's kind of a pain if you need an up-to-date C++ compiler, but that will be fixed in a month).
Pros for meeting abstract: it's what ORCID import does automatically and it lets you enter both the conference name and publisher (doesn't let you enter a page count, though)
Pros for other: lets you enter a page count (doesn't let you enter a publication venue name, though)
